Wednesday, 13 May 2015

Azure Cloud App Discovery now generally available

I previously blogged about Azure Cloud App Discovery (Preview) and found it very useful. You can find that blog hereHow to use Cloud App Discovery Azure Cloud App Discovery is now generally available to Azure AD Premium customers. This was announced last week on the Active Directory Team blog by @Alex_A_Simons You can see that blog here

The functionality is all there but there is a major change since Preview.

This is how it used to look. It was (and still is for the moment) available at https://appdiscovery.azure.comHowever now
the Discovery feature has been integrated into the new Azure Portal
(which is itself in Preview at the moment). You can access this at https://portal.azure.com

.....and this is the new Azure Portal (Preview). Remember you need to log on as a Global Administrator. Let's add the Cloud App Discovery tile to the Startboard.

The look and feel is different but the functionality is the same. Click on Quickstart.

See the available options. Here we can download the Endpoint agent to install on our user devices.

To quote from Alex's article:"Once you've installed the Cloud App Discovery agent on at least one client, you'll begin to see data on application usage in the Cloud App Discovery blades. The new blades expose all of the capabilities that the Cloud App Discovery feature had in preview. You can:

See the applications which were detected, and track application usage over time

See the number of users using a particular application, and the identities of those users

See the number of agents that are reporting data to the Cloud App Discovery service

Sort applications by number of requests, volume of data, or the number of users using the application

Control which applications to collect data on

Export data to an offline store for custom analysi"

Next time I'll be having a look around the Azure Portal to see what else is available. I'll be looking at the Privileged Identity Management feature which is seriously cool.